John Darnielle’s ‘Wolf in White Van’

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By Ethan Gilsdorf

Nov. 7, 2014

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John DarnielleCreditLalitree Darnielle

“I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else,” says Sean Phillips, the traumatized narrator of John Darnielle’s arresting, enigmatic debut novel, “Wolf in White Van.” As a kid, he was especially receptive to “dark dreams” of the pulpy, “Conan the Barbarian,” blood-oath and death-wish variety. “It had a soundtrack. All screams.”

After a gruesome accident that leaves him with a disfigured face, the teenage Sean finds himself in excruciating pain and resigned to a long hospital stay, “faced with the choice of either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit.” So he constructs a fantasy role-playing game, Trace Italian, a “game of strategy and survival” that becomes a source of income for its pain-addled inventor. Unsurprisingly, it’s set in a grim, post-­apocalyptic America of ghost towns, radiation exposure and endless dungeons. Players snail-mail Sean their text-based “moves.” These amount to choices like “Forage for roots / Follow the railroad / Wait for hunters / North to Nebraska.” Sean’s replies tell players what happens next.

As he matures, Sean becomes a cipher. He strives to “sheathe” his “old feelings” in “an imaginary scabbard inside myself.” He disappears from his parents, his caregiver and himself. “My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill,” he declares. Trace Italian becomes the private realm Sean shares with strangers. The collective will of his anonymous players becomes a stand-in for the housebound, reclusive game-master’s own desires: “The unnamed every-­player who lies in the weeds at the moment of Trace Italian’s opening move — that’s me.” Years pass, and despite gamer audiences shifting to digital realms, Trace Italian still attracts a core of players. This includes two adolescents whose interest in the game leads to one of their deaths.

“Wolf in White Van” thankfully touches only briefly on Sean’s ensuing legal trouble. Darnielle, the composer and vocalist for the indie band the Mountain Goats, also avoids the temptations of gratuitous 1980s pop culture nostalgia. (Although, immersed in that analog golden age of Dungeons & Dragons, you may long to blast your crackly Styx records and rehang those Frank Frazetta fantasy posters on your bedroom wall.) Rather, Darnielle’s subject becomes the labyrinthine twists and turns of memory and self-­building consciousness. Told largely in reverse chronology, the story doesn’t so much drive forward as connect to other points seared in the narrator’s timeless, discursive, Sebaldian present. Live scenes and dialogue in Darnielle’s novel are as scarce as survivors in Sean’s fictive world.

The narrator of Darnielle’s previous book, “Master of Reality” (a tribute to the Black Sabbath album of the same name, from the 33· series), was a metal-head teenager trapped in an adolescent psychiatric unit. He would be right at home here, as would the themes of social isolation and the redemptive pleasures of doom-saying fantasy-world-building. “Wolf in White Van” also contains echoes of R. J. Palacio’s best-selling children’s book, “Wonder,” about a similarly damaged character, although this novel is that one’s grown-up, negative-image doppelgänger.

Over the course of the story, as the wily and guarded first-person narrator unspools the clues back to the triggering, life-altering choice that cannot be undone, Darnielle gradually peels back the layers of the game world to reveal the hurt kid inside. It’s as if the steps to self-­revelation were a vast methodical game whose moves are understood only when played backward, like an LP encoded with secret messages. “Wolf in White Van” is a stunning meditation on the power of escape, and on the cat-and-mouse contest the self plays to deflect its own guilt.

“People underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood,” Sean reminds us early in “Wolf in White Van.” Because, of course, the world is senseless, without logic. It cannot be mapped like the thousands of plot points for Trace Italian that Sean stores in his voluminous and analog filing cabinets. Where else is there to go? “I closed my eyes and pictured the stronghold I’d built.” That’s the place Sean finds for solace. For others of us, we might travel somewhere even more forgiving.

Ethan Gilsdorf, a regular contributor to The Times, is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.”